


Love in the Lies of Poets

by ElisabethMonroe



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Atlantis, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Atlantis, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Romantic Soulmates, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, canon-typical abuse, professor gansey, professor ronan
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-15 05:30:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15406050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElisabethMonroe/pseuds/ElisabethMonroe
Summary: In which:Ronan is the foremost Latin expertGansey plans to find AtlantisRonan plans to find his soulmateAnd said soulmate runs awayThere's a lot of work to do





	1. A Serviceable Lie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 1: Soulmate AU  
> 

That Ronan Lynch was obsessed with Latin was no surprise. In fact, he was the foremost leading academic in the subject and the most fluent a person could be in a dead language that no one else spoke. Ronan had written entire books in Latin. No one else could read them, God no, but they sold anyway for the novelty of it all.

He never said why he’d chosen Latin, of all the dying languages. And the thick leather bands he kept around his wrist concealed the choppy Latin sentence that he’d been born with. The Latin wasn’t the best and, as far as he could tell, the beginning of the phrase wasn’t even Latin. It was something he’d never seen before. So he threw himself into Latin so that, if he ever met his soul mate, he could teach them a thing or two about grammar.

As Latin was not the most hopping of subjects, Ronan was used to spending his days locked up in a Princeton professor’s office, reading and feeding the bird that should not be living in the same office. If his phone rang, it was usually a dean calling to scold him about his low grades with undergrads, or to congratulate him about the soaring reviews his graduate students received. Occasionally, it was someone asking him to accompany a study-abroad class to Rome. And even sometimes he got calls to be a guest talking head on some History Channel production–events in which he pretended to be a lot less thrilled about about than he actually was.

So when, while he was teaching Chainsaw to fetch him papers he’d left on a stack on the opposite bookshelf, the phone rang, he was formulating a way to say no to yet another trip to Rome, in Latin this time.

But he was not met with a hesitant intern or new admin assistant–it wasn’t his fault the reputation of his surly mood moved faster than he did. Instead, he was met with a bouncy voice that he’d never heard before and he was already tired of. Chainsaw squawked by the papers.

“Hi, Dr. Lynch! I hope this isn’t a bad time.” The voice didn’t let Ronan say if it was a bad time or not. “My name is Henry Cheng. I’m a colleague of Dr. Roger Mallory and Dr. Richard Gansey. We’re planning something, Dr. Lynch. Something the world has never seen before. We have the engineers, the academics, the captains and pilots and drivers. All we need is your Latin expertise.”

Ronan pulled the phone away from his ear and stared at it for a second before pulling it back up. Henry Cheng was already continuing.

“Hello? Dr. Lynch? Can you hear me, sir?”

“I hear you, Cheng. Calm down. I’m thinking.”

“Oh, can I ask what about?” Cheng asked pleasantly.

“About what trip needs engineers and Latin experts. I don’t do archeology. If you need something translated, you’ll have to send me an etching or extract it and fly me out to the storage site.”

“Oh, no, sir. This isn’t archaeology. Gansey doesn’t have the patience for archeology and Mallory doesn’t have the time.”

“Then what is it, Cheng? Get to the point,” Ronan demanded. Chainsaw nestled down in her spot between the books. Ronan shouting was background music to her.

“Dr. Lynch, we think we’ve found the lost city of Atlantis.”

Ronan knew what Atlantis was. It wasn’t his area of study. More Greek than Latin, but he was familiar enough with the concept.

“You know it was just a metaphor right? No one’s looking for a field of angels either,” Ronan said. But he would’ve been lying if he’d said his interest wasn’t piqued. “Why me?” he asked.

“Well, why not take you? You’re the one guaranteed to find one of them, aren’t you?”

“What? Why would I be?” Ronan asked.

“Your soul mark, I mean. It’s in Atlantean, isn’t it?”

Ronan bristled and he stood so quickly, his chair hit the wall behind him. “You don’t know jack shit about my soul mark. How the hell would you know what it says?”

The line was quiet for a few moments and then a different voice was answering him.

“Dr. Lynch, I’m sorry we’ve upset you. It’s just that, well, I actually have seen your soul mark. Uh, allow me to introduce myself to you. I’m Richard Gansey. Just Gansey is fine as well. We were on a panel discussion together. Ancient Civilizations and the Kings who Led Them. It was at Cambridge’s lecture series last year.”

Ronan remembered. Gansey was into a Welsh guy and ley line bullshit. He’d been hot. “That doesn’t answer how you know that my mark is.”

“Oh! Of course. Well, it’s just that you were very striking and I watched you a lot and I noticed you always rubbed your wrist. When we shook hands at the end, I looked down at saw the writing. I recognized it instantly. You see, the idea that a lost city like Atlantis might be affecting ley line activity has kept me up and I’d already been doing research, so I knew the characters.”

Ronan sat on his desk hard. He wished it would creak like his old one at home, like anything in the Barns that was falling apart all its life. But it was sturdy and new and it didn’t protest even a little bit.

Gansey let him sit in silence until Ronan eventually asked, “Do you know what it says?”

“Oh, Dr. Lynch, I’m sorry. I don’t know. What we know and have translated of Atlantean tends to be shipping tablets. Plant and animal names. Numbers. That’s it.”

Silently, stilly, Ronan raged. Another step closer to the mystery on his wrist, the mystery he dreamed of slicing off so he never had to look at it again, and he was still no closer to understanding it.

“What is this expedition?” he asked warily.

And Gansey launched into a speech that kept Ronan on the phone until darkness fell outside and the building vacated and the cleaning crew came through and the lights flickered off every two hours. Chainsaw napped and begged for food and opened the window on her own and then napped some more.

Finally, Ronan just fell asleep. Gansey’s voice was gentle and excited and musical and it had been so long on the phone. When he woke up, the line was dead and he had an email in his inbox with tickets to meet up with the rest of the crew.

*  *  *

Where Gansey had made Ronan flip backwards out of a boat into freezing cold water was about as dark as Ronan had ever seen. He’d been snorkeling exactly twice in his life, and both times had been in the caribbean, where it was warm and light and fucking gorgeous. Not a pitch black hole. Ronan swam blindly for too long before Gansey was suddenly next to him, grabbing his arm and reaching up to turn on a light on top of the gear on Ronan’s head. Thankfully the mask and the water kept Ronan’s blush from being too visible.

No one knew where they were going. Henry stayed behind to track them on the boat and Gansey was just swimming with ‘general feeling.’ They were nearing the halfway mark on their tanks and would have to turn around soon when Ronan suddenly stopped and looked to the right. He swore he’d seen something glinting. Which would be a neat trick without any light so far down.

He gestured to Gansey and tried to remember the sign language Mallory had taught them on the sail out.  _Turn. Swim. Right._

 _Danger_? Gansey signed back.

Ronan shook his head. Instead of trying to answer again, he swam off in the direction that had caught his eye. The rocky outcrop that they’d been swimming along gave way to long path between two faces of the rocks. Ronan swam towards it, down a little bit and then back out. He gestured for Gansey to try as well.

Their air was getting lower and lower and the thought of getting stuck in the middle of an underwater cliff was kicking Ronan’s heart beat up in his chest. He knew that was bad, knew it would take more air if he started panicking, but they were so close. He could feel it. The mark over his skin was tingling, almost burning.

Gansey fit through, but he also swam out.  _You first_ , he signed.

Ronan took a deep breath, the last he would allow himself, and swam back into crevice. He only petulantly kicked water at Gansey a few times before his swimming smoothed out. The crevice was slanting downwards, but there was definitely a light source other than their harsh white headlights. It was warm. The water was tinged with it, though Ronan couldn’t find a source.

Eventually, with a quarter tank of air left, the crevice was blocked with a large boulder that had obviously fallen from a higher peak. Gansey could fit next to Ronan and he swam up beside him. Ronan could feel the disappointment and fear, electric and sharp in the water around them. Then Gansey did what he did best. He began exploring.

He looked like a bug climbing all over the rock. He pushed on it one way, then swam to the top and then down one side, checking for access or a break in the coverage. Ronan glanced at their meter and knew they should be making a hard line up to the surface of the water if they didn’t want to suffocate.

He almost grabbed Gansey but when he looked away from the black mass of water above them, Gansey had gone. Ronan quickly swam over to the rock, looking for a side crevice, a hall they hadn’t seen before. Then something was grabbing his ankle and Ronan was reacting on instinct, kicking his leg out until a cloud of bubbles obscured his view. So much for not panicking.

Suddenly Gansey was in front of him, holding his hand to his chest and looking a little hurt. He pointed to the bottom of the rock. He mimed something that wasn’t on the sheet, but that Ronan thought he could figure out. There was a passageway under the rock.

He swam down with Gansey. It was dark again, narrow. If they got stuck, hell, if it just wasn’t fruitful or put them in a cave, they were going to die. They should go back to the surface, let Henry find them, and switch out their tanks. But Gansey was already swimming down the passageway again. Ronan closed his eyes, stopped breathing, and prayed until his head went light with lack of oxygen.

Then he followed Gansey.

The passageway never widened or got brighter until they suddenly had to swim directly upwards. Hell, Ronan was half climbing along the rock face it was so steep. A bright light beckoned to the surface and Ronan hoped it was the surface of the ocean and not some flooded cave that happened to show some light.

When he broke the surface, Ronan didn’t even realize he was gasping, throwing the snorkel away from him. He gulped in too much water as he bobbed back down and then spit it all back out. Air. This was an air pocket. As long as Henry could still see them, they were going to live. He clung to the top of the rock he’d been climbing and slowly pulled himself up. The wetsuit made a wet splat as he collapsed down on the rock and he kept heaving in breaths as the terror ebbed out of his body. He could hear Gansey across the way and he covered his face with his hands.

Eventually, Gansey was next to him, must’ve walked around the cave. He worked the mask of Ronan’s suit off and helped him sit up.

“Was this…in any of…your maps?” Ronan asked, still out of breath.

Gansey shook his head and worked on getting Ronan’s wetsuit open enough that Ronan could pull the zipper down. Ronan kicked off the flippers, only just now thankful for the weird water and rock shoes Gansey and Henry insist they wear under the flippers. He tied the arms of the wetsuit around his waist, and began walking around the cave, looking at the light that was streaming in. It wasn’t exactly warm. Not anymore than a bald bulb would be from several feet away, but it was bright and natural.

Movement caught Ronan’s eye and he swiveled around to stare, trying to track it in the weird rock walls. “Hello?” he called out, slipping over the rocks as he tried to track where the movement might have lead something.

“Ronan, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Gansey called back. Ronan looked back at him blandly but his heart squeezed at the sight of Gansey’s hair wild around head from the mask, and the tired set of his eyes as he pulled off the same pieces of the wetsuit that Ronan had.

“Do you know how to say hello in Atlantean?” Ronan asked.

Now it was Gansey’s turn to stare blandly at Ronan before he said something out loudly. It almost sounded like the Latin ‘salve!’ but it was just a little off.

Small rocks cascaded down from the cave sides and Ronan and Gansey shot each other worried looks. They stared at where the sound had come from, so neither of them saw a lithe man silently creep out from another narrow passageway behind them.

These men were certainly not Atlantean. Even if weren’t for the odd ways they bundled their clothes and protected their feet, they were too broad. The taller one might be able to pass, but he was so pale it was obvious he didn’t live in Atlantis. And the other was very muscular. Atlanteans were strong. Stronger than any other civilization had been. But this man was just too bulky. He wore his strength strangely, all in his arms and chest and thighs.

They were entirely unlike anything Domitus had ever seen. He reached for the closest, loosest piece of clothing and tugged on it. He had not expected the tall man to whirl around and swing a long arm and hard fist at him. Domitus ducked quickly, but didn’t scramble away. He stared up at the man, who’d been grabbed by his companion.

“Are you human?” the shorter man asked and Domitus cocked his head to the side. Human. A word he’d heard before. In readings. But the rest of the sentence was lost on him.”

“You are not Atlantean,” Domitus said to the man instead. He watched both men’s faces go slack and they looked at each other, wide eyed and disbelieving.

“Uh…” The shorter man gestured to Domitus and said in a heavily accented Atlantean, “Title?”

Domitus had no title. He had nothing here, though he was trying to build himself up. He shook his head. “I have no title. I’m a man.”

“What’s he saying, Gansey?” the taller man asked desperately.

The Gansey’s lips screwed to one side of his face. “I don’t know. I think the translation for name was bad. Let me try the Latin.” In slightly better Latin, the Gansey asked, “What is your name? They call you…”

Domitus stared at them. Latin was his fate and he had to answer his fate. “Uh, Domitus,” he managed to screw up anyway.

“Adomitus?” the Gansey asked. “What if we called you Adam?” he said.

“The dude just said his name was Domitus,” the Gansey’s friend scoffed.

“Adam.” Domitus repeated. It was a much better name than his. “Greek?” he asked in Latin.

The Gansey shrugged. “It’s a pretty ubiquitous name.” His friend hit the back of his head. “Uh, I mean, yes. Biblical Greek. But mostly Hebrew, I think,” he added in Latin.

The taller one, the dangerous one, kneeled down in front of Domitus. “Do you speak Latin?” he asked.

“It’s fairly obvious he does,” the Gansey scoffed.

But Domitus wasn’t concerned with the Gansey right then. He stared at the dangerous one, breath catching in his throat. Yes he spoke Latin. But only because of the odd script on his hand that had taken years to decipher. He held out his wrist to the man, who took his hand far more gently than Domitus would have ever given him credit for.

“We are meant to be together,” Domitus said in Atlantean. And then his face paled and the sunlight gold markings on his skin stood in even higher contrast to his skin. “I cannot stay here,” he said in rushed Latin. He saw the man’s face fall in the worst kind of heartbreak, but Domitus was on his feet and running fast, over slick rocks and jagged edged. There was no way the man could keep up with him.

All his life, Domitus knew the gods gave him a name that meant ‘to be tamed’ and all his life, he had done anything but allow that to happen. But thinking back now, he’d been ruled so heavily by the mark on his wrist that he learned a language that was nothing more than a few conjugated verbs to Atlanteans. He had studied about a world he would never see, just in case someone came asking the question on his wrist. He’d wanted to go with them. But what more would that make him but a slave then? Even if the other didn’t realize it at first, it’s what he’d end up being. He’d thought the mark that he alone bore was a sign from fate, but men could be slaves to fate all the same as slaves to other men.

He was so under the control of the words on his wrist that he even let himself think of the pain on the man’s face as he’d run away. He let the anguished scream that filled the cave to follow him down secret ways and tangle in his sandy hair.

Behind him, Ronan was not going to let his soulmate run away. He knew his mother wouldn’t agree with his current path, that his older brother would scoff and say people like Ronan weren’t built for soul mates, and that Matthew would already have gone chasing after Adam.

Ronan shoved himself off the ground and Gansey was still so shocked by the scream that he didn’t even try to stop Ronan. Ronan tore after Adam, not even slowing down as the narrow passageways cut his face and arms and tore at the wetsuit. His feet were aching and bruised and blood was running into his eyes. He’d seen the fear in Adam’s face when Ronan had almost hit him–though the dude had snuck up on them–and he was worried that coming out of his passageway looking like a madman wouldn’t help his image any.

But he’d also seen the defiant tilt of his jaw and the sharp glint in his ocean blue eyes. If Adam was still scared of Ronan, he was going to fight like hell to present something else to the world. And Ronan was going to test that. He just wanted a few more seconds with him. Just a chance to hold his soulmate once.

He was so caught up in his thoughts and ways to apologize that he didn’t notice the passageway ending and the grassy knoll that greeted him. He stumbled on the soft dirt and fell on his face, which was good, because by the time he stopped rolling with momentum, half of his body was hanging off the side of the cliff. He scrambled back and stood up, wiping blood and mud off of him. Below the cliff, a dazzling, sparkling city sat, shining in the sunlight. He didn’t know how long he stared at it. Every emotion was overflowing in his chest. How the hell was he going to find Adam down there? Was Atlantis actually real? Was Henry coming after them? Was he ever going to get home, because he hadn’t gotten anyone to cover his lectures past this week. Mostly though he just wanted to find Adam again.

“Welcome to Atlantis, Latin Human,” a woman’s voice greeted from behind him eventually. Because he learned nothing last time,  Ronan turned with a fist ready. But it wouldn’t have mattered because the woman was a foot shorter than he was expecting and had a long, heavy staff that was connecting with his head and sending him face first into the grass again.

He thought he saw Gansey come out of the cave, hands up in surrender, eyes darting between the woman and Ronan’s body.

“Friend… Okay? … Intrude… Sorry…”

Ronan left the diplomacy to Gansey and let himself pass out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know there are grammar mistakes. I'm very tired. Yell at me about it [here](http://abarbaricyalp.tumblr.com)


	2. Cultural and Cosmic Origins

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day two: "That's not what I meant."  
> Rated M for mature touching and yearning, rated T for these dumbasses just want to yearn

Ronan had broken Gansey’s hand when he kicked him. He sat on a medical bed in a soft cloth shirt and watched a doctor bandage Gansey’s hand tightly. The girl who’d hit Ronan across the head was sitting by the door, still surly and glaring at Ronan. Ronan would glare back but there were enough bandages on his face that he couldn’t move it one way or the other. She had short dark hair, but the same gold markings in her skin that Adam had had. Her skin was darker than Adam’s, with the same sun torched glow. Ronan wondered if Atlanteans had different races.

“Who are you?” Ronan finally asked the girl in Latin. The girl bit out some response that was garbled enough he assumed it was Atlantean.

“Look, we don’t speak each other’s languages. We’re gonna have to compromise,” Ronan sighed, rubbing his forehead and then cringing when he hit one of the bandages.

The doctor across the room reprimanded him and Gansey looked up. “He said you’ll hurt yourself. Don’t touch.” Which Gansey only knew because the doctor had had to mime it to him a few times when Gansey insisted he could wrap his own hand.

The girl bit out something else and Ronan and Gansey couldn’t answer so they didn’t. The room was quiet until a newly familiar voice said in Latin, “She says you’ll bring ruin to Atlantis.”

Ronan jumped up off the medical bed and stared at Adam. Gansey reached forward--though it was an insurmountable distance between them--and the girl was ready with her staff again.

“Domitus,” she barked, and rattled off more Atlantean. There were definitely Latin roots, but it was something else too. Something Ronan wasn’t placing.

Adam kept his eyes on Ronan though and he held out his hand, showing off the black mark on his wrist. Now that Ronan wasn’t half crazed with the idea of seeing his soulmate, he realized how stark the black was against the gold of the rest of his body.

Ronan slowly extended his wrist as well, so the words on his wrist sat next to Adam’s mark. “What does this mean?” Adam asked, looking up at him. Ronan’s breath caught in his throat at just how fucking blue they were.

“It means…” Ronan wracked his brain for a way to say it in Latin. “Uh...soul,” he said, gesturing from his chest to Adam’s, “mate.” He laid his hand over Adam’s, linking their fingers. The girl above them growled in warning. “Uh...we’re meant to be. To be together.”

“Linked,” Adam said, holding their hands up.

“Yeah. Linked.” Ronan nodded and Adam brushed his fingers over Ronan’s knuckles. Adam had never been linked to anything. Certainly not in a way that made the people he was linked to so soft. Perhaps he had judged the humans too quickly. “We should go talk. Blue,” he said, looking up at her. “Let us go.”

“The Greek didn’t have a word for Blue,” Ronan said automatically. 

Adam quirked a half grin at him. “The Egyptians did. You did not think Atlantis was Greek, did you?” he asked, a higher pitched half laugh in his tone.

“The stories state that it wasn’t. The Athenians defeated the Atlanteans,” Gansey said from across the room.

“Yes, the stories do say that. But they are wrong too. Atlantis was an island between the two most powerful countries of ancient civilization. Our people have always been a conglomerate of Greek, African, and Thracian peoples.”

“Thrace doesn’t exist anymore,” Gansey added helpfully.

“Did it sink under the water as well?” Adam asked, eyes wide.

“No, that’s not what he meant. It’s just been split up into a bunch of empires and then countries. No one is ‘Thracian,’” Ronan explained. He wanted to scream at the mundane nature of the conversation. He had more thrilling exchanges with undergrads on the first day of lecture.

“Let us go. There is much to discuss,” Adam repeated, pulling Ronan out of the hospital room and towards a hall. The glass windows of the structure let Ronan take a moment to stare at the everlasting beauty of the city. It was all black marble and gold. Towering columns set off with elaborate domed tops. Multi-storey buildings with columns on both levels. Intricate statues and bursting fountains.

“Who are the statues of?” Ronan asked, and Adam smiled up at him, leading him down a hall and to a door that lead into an expansive and beautiful courtyard. He stopped them in front of one of the grand and golden statues.

“These gold ones are the Atlantean kings. There were ten to begin with. Five sets of twins. They each ruled over a part of empire. They lived for centuries. Thousands of years, even.” Adam looked up at the statue and Ronan followed his gaze. “They hold up the palace because that was a king’s job. Initially it was priests and academics so close to the palace. Even kings had to bow before the priests and they had to be reminded of that. The palace represented the whole of Atlantis. It is where everyone came to tithe and seek shelter. The palace did not support the kings. The kings supported the palace.”

The king’s old arms held the palace steadily, even after all these centuries, all these catastrophes. Ronan ran his fingers along the cool gold of a toe.

“We tell children who climb on the statues that they’re going to tickle the kings and make him drop the whole building,” Adam added after a few seconds.

Ronan grinned at him and knocked their shoulders together. “Are you calling me a child?” he teased.

“No! Of course that’s not what I meant,” Adam defended hastily. But he was grinning and walking down the road. He only stopped where there was a clearing in the buildings. Mountains stretched the blank distance, reaching into the steam clouds created by the ocean how many ever miles away. They were the same deep black that the buildings were reinforced with.

“They were originally intended for protection,” Adam explained. To keep people out, save us from attack, when we were above ground. Thousands of people died when the city collapsed in the water. Farming people. No one who’d earned the wrath of the rest of the world. The mountains had been twice, thrice as tall as they are now. The damage stretched for stades. Our people still find skeletons when we explore all the way out there.”

Still, Ronan couldn’t help but think they were beautiful. He reached for Adam’s hand and carefully threaded their fingers together. They stood in silence, staring at history and war.

Adam pulled him away eventually, down a winding staircase with a millennia of wear on its steps. It swooped under a waterfall and they were suddenly walking down another narrow crevice. When they came into the light again, the city scape was gone, replaced with fields so green, it hurt Ronan’s eyes to look at them. It felt so much like home that Ronan’s stomach rebelled and he almost lost the paltry lunch he’d had on the boat.

Adam wove them in and out of the way of odd animals that may have been sheep and goats once. Everything was off here. All of these evolutionary quirks made Ronan feel far too human. This was all more than even he could dream. 

Eventually, Adam sat them down in the middle of one of the fields and pet a goat-animal that came around to lay in his lap.

“You’re a farmer?” Ronan asked, gesturing around.

Adam scowled and nodded. “I am trying not to be,” he answered. “Before the flood, we were split into three concentric rings. Farmers were outside even the rings. There’d be no chance I could ever become more. But now, with the flood and the earthquakes, the landscape is constantly changing. Canals are blocked off, barracks are destroyed. What once were rings are not just destroyed stepping stones to the bottom of the ocean. There is no structure to our land anymore, so anyone can be anything without having to surpass birthright.”

Ronan nodded, though he didn’t know if he could sympathize. His birthright put him where he wanted to be. It was his father’s death rights that kept Ronan from his ideal future.

“We should start over,” Ronan said suddenly. He reached out to trace his fingertips over Adam’s face, thumb brushing his nose. “Hello. I’m Ronan Lynch.”

Adam grinned and reached out to touch Ronan’s nose as well. “Is this how humans say hello?” he asked.

“No, not really. That’s not what I meant,” Ronan admitted with a shy smile. “I just can’t believe that you’re real.”

“Because I am Atlantean?” he asked.

“No. Because I never thought I’d find a soulmate.”

“I still do not understand the concept of soulmate. Are you not linked with the Gansey you brought?”

“Gansey? I barely know him. We met a few weeks ago.” Ronan shrugged and pushed his fingers through the grass.

“But you are linked. You have come here together, alone. You cannot return from whence you came without doing it together as well, correct?”

Ronan thought about it and then shrugged again. “I guess.”

“And you are the only two who will ever know what it was like here.”

“Not if we lead another expedition,” Ronan pointed out casually. He only said it to be contradictory, but Adam’s face clouded over with some strange mixture of hope and fear. 

“You cannot. The mountains are always shifting. The way you leave will not be open by the time you return.”

Now it was Ronan’s turn for his face to cloud. “So if I left, I’d never be able to get back here?”

Adam titled his face to the sky and the markings on his skin glowed. “I’m afraid not. You are the first humans to even find the entrance to Atlantis at all. The cave you were in is the oldest opening and the furthest anyone has gotten but they all die there.”

“Well you did lead me to the crevice.”

Adam looked at Ronan sharply. “You can tell no one that,” he said quickly. “They must believe you came here on your own. You just found a path.” His oceanic eyes watered and Ronan wrapped an arm around Adam’s shoulders quickly. He would do anything not to see Adam cry.

Adam tensed for just a second before he was collapsing into Ronan’s chest, wrapping his arms around him tightly and hiding his face in the soft material of his shirt. He hadn’t realized how touch starved he was until Ronan’s warm skin was on his.

“They’ll never let me study at the university if I they think I am a traitor.”

“Bringing me here would be a traitorous act?” Ronan asked with a scoff.

“That’s not what I meant,” Adam assured. He slowly curled his fingers around Ronan’s hip and held him close. The material of the pants he’d been given slid along the grass and Ronan toppled backwards, pulling Adam down next to him. Adam laid half on Ronan’s side and half on the cool grass.

“Why do humans cover so much of their bodies? You and your Gansey both wanted full coverage clothing, rather than our skirts?” He gestured to the wrapped fabric around his waist, extra cuts draped down the front of his legs. Adam’s lack of dress that not escaped Ronan’s notice. He’d been politely not mentioning it.

“I don’t know. Humans cover up. There are laws. Public decency things.”

“What is indecent about your own body?” Adam scoffed. He smoothed his hand down Ronan’s chest and then to his thighs. Ronan’s body jerked under the touch, but if Adam noticed he didn’t say anything.

“Your friend Blue, she was covered,” he pointed out. Again, if Adam noticed the strain in his voice, he ignored it.

“She was dressed for battle. We’re supposed to protect ourselves if we go to the cave. Humans have killed us before. It’s why we stopped trying to help them escape their watery death.”

Ronan thought that was fair.

“She doesn’t trust you. Or any human. She thinks they stole her father. That’s why she was still in the gear in the medical room.”

Ronan nodded because that was fair too. He was wary of men who might’ve taken his own father. Adam’s hand was getting too close to the inside of Ronan’s thigh, so he grabbed his wrist to replace it on his chest.

“You  _ are  _ ashamed of your body,” Adam laughed softly. He pressed his rough fingers against his shirt and leaned forward to rest his forehead on Ronan’s shoulder. Ronan brought his hand up to card his fingers through Adam’s wavy hair. He turned his head to press a kiss to his temple, chaste and harmless. The breath Adam let out was hot, even through his shirt.

Ronan moved a hand to the hard muscle of Adam’s stomach, over his waist and his ribs, his chest, and back down his sinewed arms. Adam’s breath hitched but he didn’t lift his head.

They let their hands travel slowly and softly, feeling new muscle and odd dips in bones that they weren’t used to. Their lips occasionally briefly brushed skin and they didn’t talk, even in quiet whispers.

“Does soulmate mean love and safety?” Adam asked eventually.

Ronan let out a heavy breath and closed his eyes as he nodded. “Yeah, Adam. That’s what I meant.”


	3. tin epithymía tis kardiás

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day three: Bonfire

They passed the days like that, lazy and soft in the sun. Ronan had begun to panic about the time passing, but Adam was quick to assure him that days were faster in Atlantis. It wasn’t so much that Atlantis based time around the sun and Earth’s rotations. The ocean was its own world and the fickle light sources that Ronan could never find were fueled by the sun, but were not the sun. Even with shorter nights, Ronan felt more rested than he had in over a decade. 

Adam always had some place to show Ronan, leading him around, marked hand in marked hand. He tried to show Ronan places outside, always very aware of the way Ronan’s mood lifted when he was surrounded by grass and trees and light. All of Ronan’s sharp edges were illuminated when he tilted his face to the warmth, or curled his fingers in long strands of grass, but in those moments, Adam always forgot how sharp he was anyway.

Seven  Atlantean days passed before Adam took Ronan to his most cherished public space. It took almost too long to climb all the stairs to the ornately carved stone building. Friezes in the recognizable black and gold decorated the top two feet of all the three floors. Frescos dripped down the walls like after thoughts and half statues seemed to pull themselves from the columns holding each roof up.

Ronan stared with wide eyes. He’d seen hundreds of libraries, some of the best in the world, and some of the oldest, but he’d never seen anything like this. Adam grinned widely up at him.

“We do not have many volumes not in Atlantean. Only a few thousand across Greek, Latin, Egyptian and other African languages, and Thracian. I think you will find some of our Latin inspiring though.”

“How did books survive the flooding?” Ronan asked, letting Adam lead him into the open space inside. The large, circular room opened into six different rooms that stretched so far back, the spaces went dark before Ronan saw the back shelves.

“Some gods were merciful to us. Things were saved sparingly. Our library before the flood would have broken your mind. Humans just cannot fathom such expanse.” Adam only sounded a little bit smug about it. The longer he spent with Ronan and Gansey, occasionally, the more he came to realize humans were not quite so different from Atlanteans. Stunted and odd, but not worlds away as he once imagined.

Adam rubbed his hand over Ronan’s lower arm and let him drink in the sights. Adam had noticed around Gansey that Ronan was bitter and short, cutting his joy off from his voice and face. But, alone, Adam got to see him light up with the promise of adventure and knowledge. Adam had asked Ronan why this was once, and after the light scoffing and eye rolling, Ronan had said Gansey just never asked the right questions, or seeked the right answers for Ronan’s taste.

“You,” he’d said, rough fingers brushing over the scarred markings on Adam’s face, near his temple, “are always leading me just where I want to be.” Then he’d smiled and brushed his thumb over Adam’s nose until Adam giggled and had to fight down the urge to sneeze.

So, yes, Adam let Ronan look and breathe in the beauty that he longed for. But, eventually, he had to pull Ronan away. “This is our foreign room. Not many use it. I’m one of a handful in Atlantis that can speak a language other than Atlantean.”

“What about Blue?” Ronan asked with a small smirk. As the days wore on and Adam and Ronan grew closer, it was obvious Gansey and Blue were also forging a vaguely steady repertoire with each other. Ronan’s jealousy bloomed even when he couldn’t recognize it. Sometimes it was a little tiresome to indulge in his need to prove himself better, but they were both in a good mood and Adam could detect just a little bit of genuine curiosity in Ronan’s tone.

“She cannot speak another language, but her family communes with the dead and the gods.”

“Bullshit,” Ronan said, admiration plain in his tone. Ronan always believed in the magic of Atlantis. There had never been a thing he’d seen, a place they’d gone, or a story Adam told him that Ronan didn’t instantly believe and devour with a religiosity that would put the priests to shame.

There was something magic about Ronan himself. Blue had told him as much when they’d eaten an evening meal with her family.

“Domitus,” she’d said, pulling him aside into a room he knew only briefly during an attempted relationship that had gone nowhere quickly. “The man you’ve brought...there is something otherworldly about him. Not just Earth. Something beyond Earth.”

Adam had frowned at her, rubbing at one of the sigil markings on his arm. “Humans don’t have the magic of Atlantis. And no other civilization had had magic,” he’d pointed out.

“I felt it, Domitus. The air cackles around him with energy. He’s more beyond Earth than some of the elders here.”

“What kind of energy?” Adam had asked. He knew Ronan was a multi-faceted puzzle, something he’d only seen a few pieces of, but he didn’t want to lose him to magic, like he’d lost so much else to it.

“There is a spirit attached to him. Something trying to speak to him. Old and strong. But there’s something else. Something  _ in  _ him. He brought something else with him.”

Adam had shook his head. “You just want him to leave. You want to take him from me. Is it not bad enough that your soldiers follow us wherever we go?”

“He is the true desire of your heart, Domitus, I know that. We can see that. But your heart is not the only one in this city.” Blue had looked at him with outright pity and Adam had left the room before she could say anything else.

There was something special about Ronan. Watching him run his long fingers over dusty spines in languages that Adam couldn’t begin to decipher proved that. But there wasn’t an evil energy about him. Nothing that would endanger the world Adam loved. Ronan loved it too. Adam knew his heart yearned for the one he’d come from, but Ronan didn’t treat Atlantis like something to be studied scientifically, like his companion did.

Adam knew Ronan’s judgement was clouded. He radiated the need to be loved like he radiated energy to Blue. The scream that had ripped from his chest in the cave all those days ago still haunted Adam. He could see all of the fight and feral-ness of Ronan’s human side when his companion suggested they find a way to ‘radio’ back to a ship they had come from. He’d seen anger like when Ronan had first raised his hand to Adam in the cave when Gansey said they should return to the surface, to Earth. It was a specific kind of anger. Not the base anger that cloaked the soldiers who followed them at a distance and pretended not to. It was was an anger bred of fear and hurt.

Adam had known hurt for much of his life. Physical pain at the hands of his father and mother. Emotional pain by his own mind as he struggled to do all he accomplished. And the empty ache in his chest that had overtaken him every time he looked at his wrist.

“You used these books when you were learning Latin?” Ronan asked suddenly. Adam watched the dust stirred up by his breath swirl in front of his face for a moment.

“Yes. There are few others in the whole empire who speak Latin. When I was trying to learn what was on my wrist, I had to come here. I read every book until I saw characters and words I recognized.”

Ronan made a sound and carried a stack of books over to a long table in the middle of the room. Adam sat cross legged on the table to watch him flick through pages.

“No wonder your grammar is so bad. These barely even added spaces between most of the words.”

Adam didn’t know what that meant, but he watched Ronan’s fingers brush over the letterings. Ink flaked off under his skin occasionally, but it didn’t really stop him for long.

“Do many people still speak Latin?” Adam asked. Gansey’s Latin was not the best, but Adam’s Greek was hardly passable and that was a major language.

Ronan snorted and shook his head. “Probably about as many people on Earth speak it well, as people here do.”

“Then why do you?” Adam asked. Ronan just held his wrist out, the Latin almost glowing against his skin. Adam let out a small laugh. “We learned the language for the same reason then. And had we not, neither of us would have Latin on our skins and we wouldn’t have needed to learn it in the first place.”

Ronan looked up with a smile on his face that made him look years younger. A beard had sprouted over the lower half of his face that added years to him anyway. Gansey had had no such problems, so Adam wasn’t sure what to make of it. If it was a magic thing or a Ronan thing or a human thing.

“What languages are dominant now?” Adam asked instead. If he asked about the beard, he would want to reach out to touch it, feel the odd coarseness of human hair that Atlantean hair lacked.

“English. It’s what Gansey and I speak when we’re alone,” Ronan explained. “Um, Chinese. It’s a type of… China is beyond Thrace was. To the very east. Spanish is popular. Spain is a country to the west of Greece and Thrace and Egypt. It’s on the other side of the Mediterranean ocean. But Spanish is not quite only from Spain. It has a lot of forms.”

“Greek did too. Sparta and Athens spoke different dialects and the northern plains were so removed that they almost invented a new language, like we did here.”

Ronan looked up suddenly and Adam thrilled to see a curious but studious gleam in his eye. “Do the words Linear A and B mean anything to you.”

Adam shook his head, but didn’t let himself feel bad. Ronan always had a reason that whatever he asked about wouldn’t make since to Adam.

“I figured it wouldn’t. It’s what modern researchers named it.” Ronan switched books and continued reading.

“What is Linear A and B?” Adam asked so he would look up again.

“It’s these two tablets that were found in an excavation of sites in Greece. It’s some of the oldest writing we have. We can decipher B, but not  A. Which makes people wonder if they’re different languages or dialects, or even if language was common at that point, or just personal.”

Adam nodded. “Atlantean was dialectal for a long time. Even after they went under the water. Thracian peoples and African peoples and Greek peoples all had their language dominant their culture. We find volumes still that no one can read anymore because it is too Thracian, et cetera.”

Ronan looked like he was about to say something else when a guard burst into the room. “Domitus.” He gave a slight bow to Adam, more of a nod and gesture. “Human.” This he almost spat. “Your presence is requested in the palace immediately.”

Ronan and Adam exchanged looks, but before they could move to each other, the soldier was pulling Ronan away, marching him out of the room. Adam struggled to keep up, despite knowing the way better than the soldier.

Gansey and Blue were both in the palace when they arrived. Blue looked furious and Gansey was fidgety in a way Adam hadn’t been able to catalogue yet. He realized with a start that Gansey’s hands were bound in front of him. Adam quickly moved to Ronan’s side, grabbing his wrist to keep anyone from hurting him. Blue had traded the flowing robes she’d been wearing the past few days for full battle gear again.

“What is going on?” he asked in Atlantean. He had to. He’d translate for Ronan when he had an answer.

“The desire of your heart lead more here. They fear an invasion,” Blue answered, keeping an icy look on Gansey.

The soldier who’d brought Ronan and Adam in made a noise behind them. “We shouldn’t be telling him anything. He probably conspired with them. He probably brought them here in the first place.”

Blue cut a look at the soldier. “Speak when spoken to,” she barked out. Still, she cut to the lingo that the soldiers used and Adam didn’t understand. He leaned towards Ronan’s ear instead.

“They think there’s another human.”

He could feel Ronan tense under his hand and from the way Gansey jolted, they were staring each other down. Finally, he asked something in English that stopped Blue and the soldier’s conversation. Adam wished he knew what any of them were saying.

“Domitus, do your sigils tell you of any danger?” Blue asked. Adam looked at her sharply. “You are a priest, deny it as you will. Are the gods telling you something?”

Adam shook his head slowly eventually. “Just the energy of the festival this evening,” he said slowly.

Gansey perked up and in terrible Atlantean, he repeated, “Festival?” He said something to Ronan in English that Adam assumed was a translation.

“Henry would bring a party,” Ronan growled in Latin. Just for Adam. Adam squeezed his wrist again.

“It’s a celebration of light. The gods do not have to bless us with light this far down but they do. We thank them every year by creating the largest fire we can in one of the fields. We sacrifice animals and plants and they send us new kinds and renew our light sources,” Adam explained back.

“What are they doing to Henry?” Ronan asked.

“Did you lead him here?” Adam asked instead of answering.

A muscle worked in Ronan’s jaw and his eyes were fixed in a glare on Gansey. “We both did. There were trackers in the suits we wore. He followed our path right…”

“To the medical unit. The heart of the palace,” Adam finished for him. It made his blood run cold, to think of the danger that Ronan had brought to the city. Humans knew how to get here. Until the next shift in the rocks, Atlantis wasn’t safe. And it was Ronan’s fault.

But Blue was right. Half the pain of his childhood was being a mouthpiece of the gods. The fire the sigils would burn into his skin when they wanted him to know something, the aching they left behind, and the cold that Adam couldn’t describe when they were completely silent tormented him more days than not. But he’d spoken true. The sigils were only humming in excitement for the festival. He could almost, almost, hear the singing of the lesser gods, who were closer to Adam’s Atlantean divinity.

“It’s safe, Blue. Let them see each other,” Adam assured again. His back was to the door, but the way Gansey visibly relaxed was a sure sign that Henry was in his line of sight and okay. Ronan looked over his shoulder and rolled his eyes. 

He rattled off something in English, biting and mean, but a little fond. Henry replied with as strong a tone as he could manage despite the wobble in his voice. Gansey said something and was suddenly across the room, a soldier striding after him. Despite his bound wrists, Gansey leaned into Henry and Henry’s arms came up to hold him tightly. It was so raw that Adam looked away. He studied his thumb as it brushed over Ronan’s mark, Adam’s own words in his messy scrawl.

Suddenly, in Latin, Henry was asking, “Is this him? The soul mate?” When Adam turned, Henry was studying him, a kind of mirth on his face that Adam wondered could be removed. He must have been terrified, but he was working up to a full grin the longer he stared at Adam’s hand on Ronan’s wrist.

“That’s him,” Gansey agreed with his own gentle smile. “They’re terrible to spend time with together.”

Adam could feel Ronan’s scowl without looking up at him.

“Keep the humans together. Find the trackers. Destroy them,” Blue ordered, cutting off the conversation.

Adam faltered. “Wait. No. Don’t take him. Let me… You said so yourself. He’s magic. Look at him. He’s  _ light _ . Let me take him to the festival. Don’t say you don’t want the other one with you.”

Blue turned that hard gaze on him, but Adam had been scrutinized by her enough times to stand his ground. “Please,” he added softly. “He is the desire of my heart. I cannot leave him now that I know where my missing heart beats are.”

Blue sneered and then waved a hand. “You are already under surveillance. I’ll double the soldiers tailing you. And you will make yourself seen at least four times an hour. Do not run, Domitus. He is not worth it.”

Adam thought Ronan was worth a lot of things. But he remained silent.

*  * *

Ronan was actually very helpful once Adam let him know what bargain he’d struck. Lithe though he was, he was strong too. Not as strong as an Atlantean, but he could carry wood across the fields and chop more when men wanted a break. Through it all, he kept an eye on Adam always. Adam swore he felt the sigils warm when Ronan was looking at him.

By the time it was dark, the fire was lit and large, stretching so far into the sky that Adam couldn’t see where the flame flickered out, only where darkness bled in on the sides.

“Do you have fire on Earth still?” Adam asked. They were sitting together, alone for the first time since Henry arrived. In the grass, their fingers tangled together and they kept leaning into each other for no real reason.

“We still have fire, yeah,” Ronan laughed, looking at Adam with a grin. In the firelight, he looked young again, softer than he should with the flickering shadows playing tricks over his face.

“Fires like this?” Adam asked.

Ronan nodded and straightened up again. His muscles tensed and relaxed just as quickly. Some kind of reflex tamped down. “We call them bonfires. Usually we’re not sacrificing food, we’re eating it.”

“Is that all you do at bonfires?” Adam asked.

Ronan laughed again and shook his head. “We dance like that,” he said, gesturing to the wild and carefree and happy Atlanteans by the base of the fire.

“Sacrificial celebration?” Adam asked.

“No. It’s just a way to be close and happy with someone,” Ronan explained.

“How does it help you be close?” Adam asked.

Ronan leveled a cool look on him and Adam felt his heart kick up into his chest. “Let me show you,” he said, standing up and offering a hand down to Adam. He hauled him up and then pulled him close. “Okay, you’ll put your arms around my neck like this,” he said, moving Adam’s arms. In the fire, the sigils glowed and they were warm in his skin.

“And I’ll hold you around the waist like this. Now we just move to the music,” Ronan said, shifting his weight back and forth.

“But we dance to the words. You don’t know the words of these lyrics,” Adam pointed out.

“Well, on Earth we actually dance to the rhythm. Or, you’re supposed to. Most dance music doesn’t even have words.”

Adam must have looked appalled because Ronan laughed, head thrown back. “Don’t look like I just killed your cat. A lot of still does. But you’re supposed to feel the music, move to it.”

He kept his hips and torso shifting until Adam was moving with him. And, yes, he completely understood why this would make people feel close to each other. Ronan let his forehead rest against Adam’s and they swayed back and forth in the grass by themselves. Adam thought this celebration was suddenly not about the gods and light, but about Ronan and love.


	4. The Many Virtues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day Four: Death  
> Day Five: Time Travel  
> I was already planning on combining these two for day four anyway and I ended up sick, so have a long chapter for two prompts  
> Rated M: For mature thigh kissing  
> TW: Canon typical violence and abuse

Adam woke up with Ronan under him. The shirt Ronan was still insisting on wearing had a damp spot where Adam had drooled on him, and the white of the shirt was making Ronan’s fire warmed skin look even brighter. Ronan was graceful and sharp, even in sleep, even with the soft sunlight filtering in through the window in Adam’s small room. Adam reached up to run the edge of his thumb down Ronan’s nose and smiled softly when the man begin to shift.

“Matty, stop,” he mumbled, reaching up to bat Adam hand away. His words could do it well enough. His hand fell to his side and he frowned at Ronan’s face. He thought he could lay still and forget it, but the name bounced around in Adam’s  head until he had to stand up and do something else.

It barely took three minutes before Ronan was sitting up in Adam’s small bed, rubbing his hands over his eyes and stretching his arms over his head until something snapped in his back. “What’re you doing over there?” he asked around a yawn. “Come lay down again. You were warm.”

Adam shook his head and continued tying a light blue skirt at his hips. “Who’s Matty, Ronan?”

Ronan’s frown was almost audible. “What? How do you know…?”

“You said his name. While I was touching your face.” Adam turned to stare at Ronan finally, chin a little dimpled.

“Oh, Adam, no,” Ronan said quickly. He was out of bed in one fluid movement adn Adam wondered how so much lank moved like silk. Ronan wrapped his arms around Adam and pressed a smile into his hair. “Matthew is my little brother. If I said his name in my sleep, it’s because you were doing something to irritate me.”

Adam relaxed a little. Ronan talked about his brothers sometimes. They had been a concern when he thought he was losing time. And from what Adam had gathered over the week, Ronan didn’t lie.

“I’m sorry I assumed…” He started, but Ronan only held him tighter.

“It’s okay. Jealousy’s kind of a good color on you.”

Adam rolled his eyes and squirmed out of Ronan’s hold. “Let me make it up to you.”

“How are you planning to do that?” Ronan asked with an amused smirk.

“Well, there’s one place I haven’t taken you yet,” Adam admitted.

“It’s a big underwater island. I imagine there’s a lot of places you haven’t taken me.” Ronan pulled Adam back to him, running his hands over Adam’s bare sides. It had been over a week but he still couldn’t get over the lines of muscles and ribs and the tapering down into his waist, under the drape of fabric wrapped around his narrow hips.

“A place that means something to me,” Adam clarified. Sometimes it was easy to just give in to Ronan’s teasing than try to fight him with logic.

Ronan smiled, just a little bit less edge to it than his smirk. “Alright, shithead,” he said, which had no translation into Latin, and so Adam still didn’t know what it meant. “Lead the way.”

Like all their treks through the continent, it was filled with winding slopes and narrow crevices and far too many stair like features. Adam held onto Ronan’s hand the whole time, like he always did, and Ronan detoured them to look at animals, like he always did.

They came upon a grand waterfall, bigger than any of the others Ronan had seen. Atlantis was full of them. Ronan supposed it was fair. If Adam’s accounts were to be believed--and Ronan had no reason not to believe them--there had been towering mountains surrounding the island, and smaller ones across the continent. They crumbled and fell to create wondrous backdrops to cascades of water, some from rerouted sources in Atlantis and some from the ocean above where the gods’ protection didn’t hold for one reason or the other. Most of the waterfalls were small enough that there was no fear in playing in them, or drawing water from them.

This, Ronan would not willingly swim under. But Adam turned a playful, teasing smirk on him and dived straight into the water and Ronan had no choice but to follow. He pulled off the shirt he’d been wearing and untied the skirt draping before jumping after Adam in just the subligaria-like garment left. The clear, bright water astounded him as it did every time. He could easily follow Adam as he swam ahead of Ronan. He disappeared under the spray of bubbles, body tumbling along with the powerful current and Ronan panicked until he remembered that this was a place Adam knew well. He was sure it was just easier to swim through if he let himself get knocked around.

He swam after Adam and then up when he veered upwards. He broke the surface with a small gasp and Adam right against his chest. It was darker in this cave than most of the others they’d been in. Almost all of the light came from glowing plants and rocks in the walls and under the water. It threw all of Adam’s face into shadows and highlights and made him look young, like a boy. His grin helped.

“Isn’t it beautiful? We used to mine the rocks and it caused a collapse. We’ve never found them again. Only this place and it’s such an odd journey to get here that I haven’t told anyone. I mean, I’ve been told all my life that I’m different because of this,” he said, holding his wrist up. “And here...different means special, not weird.” He shrugged and rubbed his arm. “That probably doesn’t make any sense I know. It’s just that I thought you--”

Ronan leaned forward and kissed Adam quickly, lips pressing together for the briefest moment before he was pulling away. When he looked at Adam, his hands were half raised and his eyes still closed. So Ronan leaned in to kiss him again and they picked right up. Ronan brought his hands to Adam’s face at the same time Adam’s hands found his. Finally Ronan could sink his fingers in Adam’s hair. He didn’t care that it was wet and dark. He’d wanted to do that for so long. He didn’t care that his nose was ended up folded against Adam’s cheekbone, or that he could feel the warmth of the sigils against his palms getting hotter by the second.

“I want to know you in every way,” Ronan growled out eventually, having to rest his forehead against Adam’s so he could pull in lungfuls of air as quickly as possible. He wanted to get back to kissing Adam fast.

“I want that too. Want to be known, want to know you,” Adam said, and the water dwelling bastard had a level tone, hardly a hitch to his breathing, though even in the pale light the sigils were standing out starkly on the blush that was creeping down his face.

“Can I--” Ronan started, before wrapping his arms around Adam’s waist and pulling him out of the water to deposit him on the bank of the bath. He gently spread Adam’s legs so he could drift between them, eyes on Adam’s face the whole time.

“What are you doing to me?” Adam asked, easing back onto his elbows.

“Worshipping you the way you deserve to be worshipped.” Which was a blaspheme for both their religions but Ronan didn’t care at all.

Adam bit his lip and tipped his head slightly, so Ronan took it as his go ahead. He leaned down to press soft kisses to the inside of Adam’s thighs, slowly working his wet skirt down towards Adam's hips as he went. He didn’t touch the subligaria as he made his way over Adam’s hips and to the taut stretch of skin between them, just above the tie of his skirt. Then he worked his way back down Adam’s other thigh. He couldn’t help but press his face to it once he’d gone as far as he could without moving.

“Ronan,” Adam groaned above him while Ronan reworked his trail. He ignored the sigils warming under his hands and mouth. He assumed it was because all of Adam was getting hotter. But then suddenly Adam’s hand was on his head. “Ronan,” he repeated with just a little bit of an edge to his voice.

Ronan pulled himself out of the water and crawled over Adam’s body, letting all the water drip onto Adam’s bare skin. Adam wrapped his arms around Ronan’s neck and Ronan ducked down to kiss his jaw, only partially because his skin felt like fire.

“Ronan, something’s happening to me,” Adam muttered, hands falling away from Ronan’s skin. Only then did Ronan feel the slight burn their left over his shoulders, like walking away from a fire he’d been sitting close to.

“What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked, pushing himself up so his arms were straight and there was a little distance between them.

“The gods...they’re answering a prayer.”

“What? You know when they answer prayers?” Ronan asked, brow furrowing.

“No...my prayer.”

“What did you pray for?”

“I wanted to--”

Then suddenly they were standing in Ronan’s childhood room. They were still dripping wet and Ronan thought about a spill mark he’d gotten in trouble for over and over that he could never remember having done.

The BMW pulled into the gravel driveway and Ronan’s body was lurching towards his window without him realizing it. And then his thirteen year old body was zooming through him as if he wasn’t there.

“Is that you?” Adam asked softly. He reached out a hand for the full head of curls, though it fell right through them. Thirteen year old Ronan played with Irish Green-Army-Men in their Aurora-And-Ronan-hand-painted kilts. He marched them across the window sill until half of them fell over as the AC kicked on and he had to crawl under his desk to get them.

Ronan nodded mutely before turning and running out of the room, down the stairs, and out the door. Adam barely kept up with him. He wanted to know Adam’s thoughts about the Barns and the homey, Lynch decorations, but now was not the time.

“Dad!” he called out before he could see the BMW. “Dad! Don’t! Don’t! Stay in the car! Don’t open the door!” he begged. His throat was closing up. He knew what day this was. He had to stop it. From this angle, just a few seconds earlier than he had been as a kid, he could see the man in gray coming around the messy tin barn that held broken machinery. He could see him move through the dreary foggy, rainy mist to the BMW like he wasn’t about to ruin Ronan’s life.

“Dad! Please!” he begged, though his voice wasn’t echoing like it always did when he shouted on the property.

He’d never heard it before. The sounds of his father’s struggle, of his dying breath. Somehow, Adam held him back, kept the BMW out of his line of sight. He could hear his father’s breath gurgling in a blood filled throat and he broke down, collapsing against Adam’s side.

He missed the interrogation completely as the sound of blow after blow landed on his ears instead.

Then. Silence.

And then the door.

Ronan spun around, tried to catch his thirteen year old self around the waist. Stared at the overjoyed grin on his face instead. Ronan hadn’t smiled like that since this day.

“I wasn’t sitting at the window waiting, Dad! So you can’t think I’m a spy. You can’t go to the barns to work!” A story Aurora had told Ronan time and time again as a child when he’d wait for his father, only to see him beeline for more work in one of the barns.

Thirteen year old Ronan ran right through Ronan’s arms and around the old tin barn. Ronan fell to his knees, probably at the same time his past self was falling over Niall’s body. He thought he should be throwing up. His stomach hurt, he was light headed. He could smell the blood on the gravel.

He heard his past self’s scream, not so much in fear as in anger and anguish. “Mom! Mom! It’s dad! Mom!” he shouted, running through Ronan and Adam again into the house to find a completely non-responsive mother.

A few minutes later, he heard himself screaming for Declan in a way he never would again after this day too. “Dec! Dec! Something’s happened! Please! Help me! Please be okay!”

And Declan’s footsteps on the old wood floor. And then his own shouting.

“No! Matty! No! Stay in your room!” young Ronan ordered. A door slammed in the house and Matthew’s fists on the other side of it resonated too.

Ronan didn’t realize how badly he was sobbing until his face was pressed to Adam’s shoulder and snot was being dragged across his cheek.

“Why did you bring me here?” he whimpered softly, clutching onto Adam’s waist tightly.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I didn’t do it. I don’t have control over it. They just...speak through me,” Adam apologized, stroking his hand over Ronan’s short hair.

Ronan shook his head, eyes squeezed shut.

When he opened them, they were in Atlantis. A part of it he’d never been before. It was dark and dirty. Ronan hadn’t been aware Atlantis could get dirty, certainly not like this.

“Oh, Gods,” Adam whispered, hand finding Ronan’s as they stood together.

“You think the gods chose you?” a deep voice scoffed. The falling apart building they were in seemed to shake and a few seconds later, a younger Adam stumbled into view. He wasn’t as young as Ronan had been, but his hair was shorter and he was thinner and the sigils on his skin weren’t all there. Ronan wondered if he’d still be adding more now.

“The only thing you’d be good for is choking on their cocks.”

A man followed after Adam. Ronan had never seen an ugly Atlantean, but this man was certainly an example of all. He had none of the sigils that Adam did, or the neatly folded skirt. He was grey in the skin.

“Tell them to bless us with some fucking money and then you may not be so worthless.” The man spat at Adam and Ronan surged forward, knowing it was pointless. Adam caught him and held him back and the past-Adam stared at them, like he could see them.

“What? Are they talking to you right now?” The man stepped towards them, standing right in between Ronan’s shoulder and arm until Ronan scowled and stepped away.

Past-Adam smirked and then it all moved very quickly. Ronan was a fighter. He had been for years. He was amazed they let him teach college with the juvie record he unofficially had. Even so, it didn’t prepare him for the way the man threw himself at Adam, shaking his head against the wall until the rocks came away bloody and there were fingerprint bruises at his neck, and then throwing him down a depression in the flooring. Adam landed on his head and didn’t move for too many breaths. When he did, it was only to lift himself on one arm and immediately fall on his face again.

“See if the gods save you now,” the man spat, throwing a book down on Adam’s back so he collapsed again. Other belongings followed, most aimed at Adam’s head and weak points of his body. Adam collected as much as he could, stumbling  and falling and often having to sit back and catch his breath or stop his head spinning. Eventually, the man threw a parring knife down at Adam. It landed tip down in the floor. “Cut that ridiculous thing out of your wrist while you’re at it, freak. No one’s ever chosen you. Not the gods, not the humans. No one would want you.”

Now-Adam’s hand was so tight in Ronan’s, Ronan thought he might actually break it. Then-Adam took his things outside finally and Adam and Ronan followed without meaning to.

“Was that your father?” Ronan asked softly.

Adam nodded stiffly. “That was only half the fight. I don’t remember how the first half went. It happened almost every night. This was the worst. I--”

“You’re deaf, aren’t you? In this ear?” Ronan reached around to touch the ear on Adam’s other side. The side he slept on. The side he never let Ronan walk on. He’d been able to decipher Ronan and Gansey’s sign language without even speaking English. “I’m so stupid. I never realized…”

“It’s okay,” Adam said quickly. “I just want to forget it ever happened.”

“Is he still alive?” Ronan asked. There was a hard edge to his voice, like his words were having to grind past the tight set of his jaw.

“I don’t know. I guess. I haven’t been out there since this night.”

“I’m going to find him,” Ronan said, a promise like a knife, “and I’m going to kill him.”

Then they were in the middle of a college commons green. Matty was in burgundy robes, grinning from ear to ear and Declan was pressed to the nines, looking like he’d just stepped out of Vogue. And Ronan was between them, an arm around each of his brothers, cheesing for a camera.

“I can’t believe you actually made it,” he teased once Declan had his phone back in his hand. He rubbed his fingers through Matthew’s hair, knocking his hat to the ground in the process.

“It was you we were worried about,” Matthew shot back before Declan could. And it didn’t hurt coming from Matthew.

Suddenly they were in a high end restaurant. “How’d that interview with Princeton go?” Matthew asked, all excitement as he mindlessly played with the gown folded next to him.

“It went well. Declan tried to call and bully them but I threw his phone on the couch,” Ronan said with a shrug.

“We were in my office. You threw my phone into a fish bowl,” Declan corrected in a growl as he typed away on his phone.

“Obviously you survived,” Matthew snorted before deftly grabbing Declan’s phone and dropping it in an appetizer soup.

“Matthew!” Declan roared, losing his well maintained composure hard enough to send Matthew and Ronan into fits of laughter as the nearest tables turned to stare at them.

“But-but-but I’m serious, Roan. How’d it go?” Matthew asked again around hiccuping laughs.

“I got the job,” Ronan admitted like it was no big deal. A blush colored his cheekbones quickly.

“You got it!” Matthew laughed, grabbing Ronan’s shoulders and pulling him into a tight hug.

Even Declan looked impressed. “You knew you could do it without the phone call,” he said and _sounded_ impressed. Ronan grinned at him, all teeth.

Matthew flagged down their waitress. “Hey, make it _two_ cakes. We’re celebrating a lot tonight,” he laughed. “My brothers are much more successful than me so far so they’ll grab the check.”

It startled a laugh out of Declan. “Which of us is more successful, do you think?” he asked with an amused smirk that was just entirely too close to Ronan’s.

“Princeton is pretty cool,” Matthew hummed.

“So is a self made business in the multi-millions,” Ronan pointed out, because he’d ordered enough food to not want the bill for himself alone. “Besides, half my professors made, like, seventy thousand dollars a year.”

“You made a million dollars off your book in the last two years,” Declan scoffed.

“And you made seven times that off the one last artifact you sold.”

“That your archeological crew found.”

“They so weren’t my crew. I don’t do archeology. I just told them where to go. Because I read.”

“Yeah, that’s not as cool as Dr. Malcom. Or Brendan Fraser in The Mummy.”

“Hey, just ‘cause you’re hot for those guys doesn’t mean they’re any good at their job,” Ronan shot back with an easy grin. “Declan pays. He’s the richest of us.”

“We should measure success by personal accomplishment, not by funds,” Declan said quickly.

“Oh, bullshit!” Ronan and Matthew laughed at the same time. And then Declan joined in too.

Then they were breaking the surface of the water. The sea was wine dark around them and the moon full above them. Just a few strokes away, Adam also broke the surface, shoving his hair out of his face. He looked around himself and then began to laugh. He brought his hands out of the water and studied them in the moonlight. The slick shine of the light upon the water and the dry air. The slow pruning of his fingertips in the air.

“Oh my God,” Ronan said softly. “You’ve been to the surface.”

Adam let out a breath and the water rippled under his chin. “Yeah. Only a few times. Like I said, the entrances close all the time. Even now, I was terrified I’d swim back down and not be able to get home.”

Past-Adam tilted his head back into the moonlight and he was so fucking beautiful that Ronan grabbed his Adam and  kissed him under the same moonlight until Adam was groaning against his mouth and ducking out from under him.

“Not yet, Ro. There’s something we have to do before we get too caught up.”

Ronan wanted to know what it was, but he was content to keep quiet for now, if it meant staring at Adam in the moonlight. The real moonlight. God, Ronan wondered what he looked like in the sun.

“Which do you like more? The sea or the land? Atlantis or the surface?” he asked.

Adam looked up at him and then at the other Adam, which kept swimming under the water and then coming back up. “This,” he finally said. “Both at once.”

Ronan nodded, even though he didn’t know how that was an answer.

“Which do you prefer?” Adam asked.

Ronan kept his eyes on the other Adam. “If we want to know each other entirely,” he said slowly, “memories aren’t going to do any real justice. We’ll have to try both out together.”

So, maybe he got how that was an answer after all.


	5. Demiourgos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day six: Indulgence  
> Rated M for mature (No sarcastic comments this time, it's just a mature chapter)

The cave was impossibly warm when Ronan and Adam came to again. All of the work Ronan had put into his sleep schedule seemed to have been worth nothing. His body ached and his soul ached.

He collapsed on the soft moss of the bath bank and Adam breathed heavily next to him. For a moment, Ronan just watched steam rise from the water.

“Was that...our best and worst moments?” he asked eventually. He didn’t look at Adam but he heard his hair scritching against the rocks as he nodded.

“I...wanted to know everything about you. So the gods showed us each other at the most extreme.”

Ronan swallowed hard and thought he was pretty fucking glad the gods didn’t decide to show Adam any of Ronan’s violent outbursts or the fights he instigated when he was in a rage. Or the terrors he pulled out of his dreams, the night in the church as he bled out from wounds he’d wished for so badly and that a monster gave him anyway. Hell, Ronan was lucky the gods didn’t show Adam any of his magic. Sure, Atlantis was magic and Adam obviously was too, but there was something feral in Ronan’s magic and he was sure Adam would turn from it.

“Will it happen again?” he asked.

Adam’s hand found his and squeezed his fingers. “I hope not. But I do not speak for the gods. I am only a conduit for their own words.”

Ronan sighed. Eventually, the cave cooled and Adam pulled Ronan up only to push him into the bath with a free laugh. Ronan splashed water up at him and Adam jumped in right next to him, sending a warm wave crashing over Ronan’s shoulders. Adam swam back under the waterfall and Ronan followed, catching him around the waist when they were both on dry land again.

He pulled them close so they were chest to chest. “You said there was something we had to do before I could kiss you like that,” he murmured, resting his head against Adam’s. He kept their interlocked hands between their chest and rubbed Adam’s waist with the other.

“Yes,” Adam said. “But it requires a high priest.”

“Is it a marriage?” Ronan asked, startled.

Adam laughed softly and kissed his nose. “No,  epithymía-mine. It is not a wedding.” He traced the pads of his fingers over Ronan’s slick shoulders, his chest, down his stomach. “What are the markings on your back?” he asked.

“A tattoo,” Ronan answered, half dazed by only Adam’s fingers on his chest.

“Does it mean something? Like my sigils?”

Ronan shook his head. “They don’t have to. Some of mine does, some doesn’t.”

“Why feathers?” Adam asked, looking up at him with those unfair eyes.

Ronan’s voice caught in his throat. He kissed Adam just to do something and avoid answering. Adam brought his hand up to Ronan’s head, scratching his nails against Ronan’s hair.

Still, when they pulled apart, Adam asked again, “Why feathers?”

“I don’t know. It just felt right. I dream about feathers.”

“Falling? Or on the ground? Or on a bird?” Adam asked. He knew a thing about dreams and he cared to know more about Ronan’s specifically.

“Everything. They’re always there when I dream. The forest and the feathers and the light.”

Adam smoothed his fingers against Ronan’s head and hummed softly. “What else happens?”

Ronan flinched violently and he let go of Adam, stumbled a step back. “Nothing a soulmate should concern himself with. Don’t worry about it.”

But now Adam was. Dreams were powerful things and if they made Ronan react like that, it made Adam think his dreams were more powerful than most. A sigil on the back of his shoulder burned white hot, but Adam wouldn’t make Ronan touch it.

“Let us return,” he said. “Could we go to your room?”

Ronan was staying in the palace, though he’d only spent a night or two there during this entire experience. It was beautiful and grand and sat just above a spectacular water spectacle. When he was in his room, Ronan wanted nothing more than to fall into it from the window.

There was already so little that Ronan wouldn’t give Adam and he’d just denied him something else. Adam asked for so little that Ronan was certainly not going to say no about returning to an abode far grander than Adam’s mid-field dwelling.

It was a hike back to the palace. It had been a hike from Adam’s place, and then they had to go some dozen stades further, over rough terrain and bodies of water that Adam was always willing to frolic and play in. When they reached the metropolis, it was unusually quiet. The normal putter and noise and beauty was toned down.

“They’re still recovering from the festival,” Adam explained when he caught Ronan looking around. “It’s usually quiet after a night of reverence and celebration.”

He took Ronan’s hand and led him past the library and the infirmary entrance, up the grand steps that Ronan was now beginning to realize must be meticulously kept up compared to the rest of the empire. Gansey was nowhere to greet them, but Blue also wasn’t following them around. Ronan chalked it up as a win. Henry was probably with Gansey somewhere. Adam knew the way to Ronan’s room and the lock sequence to get in and he pulled Ronan through the door before closing and securing it behind them.

There was a bowl of fruit on the bed, pristine, as if it had been picked that morning. Ronan figured that’s just how food worked in Atlantis. Adam crossed to the bed and took one of the pieces of fruit out, biting into it skin and all.  It was bigger than his mouth and juice ran down his chin, dripping onto his chest. Ronan came over to kneel between his legs, hands on his thighs, eyes trained on the lazy river the juice was carving down Adam’s chest. Adam held the fruit out to Ronan.

“Try it. It’s supposed to taste like the nectar of the gods.”

“Ambrosia,” Ronan said.

Adam shrugged. “If you were Greek. Try it.”

Ronan dutifully took a bite, eyes on Adam’s, but that didn’t last long because as soon as the juice hit the back of Ronan’s throat, his eyes were shut and he was honest to God  _ moaning _ , trying to work his mouth around the fruit to get a second bite.

“Woah, wait. Eat what’s in your mouth first,” Adam laughed. “It’s heavy. Strong. You may not be able to handle another bite.”

He set the fruit aside, away from Ronan’s mouth and ran his hands over Ronan’s shoulders as he did chew and swallow. And it was a lot. Instead of trying for a second bite, he leaned forward to lick the juice from Adam’s chest, sucking it out of his collarbones where it pooled a little.

Adam dropped his head back, opened the whole of his neck to Ronan’s mouth. There was no juice there, but Ronan checked anyway. Adam’s arms tightened slightly around Ronan’s neck as Ronan moved closer, moving his mouth over Adam’s chin to work the sticky juice from his skin. Ronan’s hands gently untucked the subligaria from Adam’s hips and Adam raised them up when Ronan tugged at the material.

“We left the rest of our clothes by the waterfall,” he said suddenly, smiling against the corner of Adam’s mouth.

“Then it’s a good thing no one saw us come in together,” Adam managed in a rasp.

Ronan stood slowly and undid his own subligaria. Adam laid back and let Ronan crawl over him, knees on either side of Adam’s hips. He reached for the bitten fruit and squeezed more juice over Adam’s chest, making sure to pool it anywhere he could.

He licked and kissed and sucked the juice from every inch of Adam’s skin until Adam was moaning and writhing under him before Ronan even touched him again.

“What did you need a priest to do for us?” Ronan asked softly.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll do it later,” Adam insisted, pulling Ronan into a fierce kiss and suddenly flipping them over. Then he was squeezing the juice over Ronan’s chest and it really took nothing at all for him to pull the most embarrassing noises from Ronan’s chest. Adam’s tongue was even hotter than the rest of him and some of the sigils burned Ronan to touch, but, God, it all felt so good.

“Have you ever…” Ronan asked as Adam kissed his jaw with orange stained lips. When he connected their mouths, Ronan could taste the fruit as plainly as if it were in his mouth.

“Of course I haven’t,” Adam breathed, pulling away from him. “Have you?” Ronan shook his head. “Are you lying? How can you not have?”

Which startled a grin from Ronan. “You’re really giving me more credit than I deserve about my time on Earth,” he murmured, running his fingers through Adam’s hair. He pulled his head down, but only to rest it on his shoulder so he could play with the sweat and sea dampened curls.

“Have another bite,” Adam laughed, freeing himself to sit up slightly. He grabbed a new piece and held it over Ronan’s mouth so he could lean up to bite into it. He moaned just as happily as the first time and Adam licked the juice from his face before taking his own second bite. Ronan sat up and caught falling drops of nectar from Adam’s chin before kissing him. Adam pushed him back into the bed.

Adam was glad he had no experience. They moved together, drew out noises at the same time, in ways that he was certain he wouldn’t be able to do if he’d ever loved someone before Ronan. Ronan was so, so, so loved and then so was Adam, until the plate of ambrosia was gone and they were as soaked as they had been at the waterfall.


	6. Though Strange, Certainly True

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day Seven: Tradition (maybe you'll have to squint a little)  
> Rated E for one use of a colloquial term for male genitalia  
> TW: Mentions of suicidal ideation

Somehow, Ronan was still asleep when Adam awoke. As he’d been falling asleep, Adam thought he’d never wake up within the decade and Ronan was always such an early riser. Adam had suspicions that he actually hardly slept beforehand, but he didn’t want to push Ronan to tell him. Besides, color was coming back to Ronan’s face and the half moons under his eyes were less apparent with each passing day.

In the grand light of the palace, Ronan’s naked form was stark. Adam ran his fingers over the protrusions of a hip bone and then the delicate bones of his wrist, visible because of the way his fingers were clenched around a blanket. He wasn’t so much under the blanket as that he had the blanket held to his chest and between his legs while he laid on his side. Adam could see Ronan’s cock stirring beneath the blanket the longer Adam touched him. Ronan had such a strange fascination with Adam’s hands. At first Adam had thought he was simply touch starved but, though he couldn’t discount that entirely, he was more certain now that it was just about his hands in general. Adam brushed his finger over one of Ronan’s thick eyebrows, still unable to help the smile at the coarse nature of human hair, no matter how little there was of it in a place. Then he dragged his thumb over Ronan’s nose until the man smiled and leaned forward to press a kiss to Adam’s palm without opening his eyes.

He stayed settled in bed and Adam continued ghosting his fingers over Ronan’s body. He was amazed at the difference in skin tones between them. For an Atlantean, Adam was fairly pale and his freckles were an anomaly. When Blue and he had used to twine fingers, hers were so much darker than his that he sometimes flushed with embarrassment. But Ronan’s skin was so, so pale and freckles danced over his skin, dark and obvious. They clustered around his hairline and sprinkled over his shoulders, in between the swooping details of the feathers already pulling themselves from his back. There was another collection high on his thigh, set against a purple discoloration that looked like a bruise, but only around the freckles.

“It’s a birthmark,” Ronan mumbled into his pillow as he felt Adam’s fingers still over it. “My mom said it was where an angel kissed me before sending me to her.”

“And odd choice,” Adam hummed. Still, he leaned down and pressed a kiss over the ‘birthmark’ and up to his hip bone. “What is an angel?” he asked, laying down so he was mostly eye level with Ronan.

“A religious figure. The first of God’s creations. His first children.”

“Like Titans in the Greek canon?”

Ronan hummed thoughtfully before shaking his head. “Angels don’t become gods in their own right. They’re powerful, but not really worshipped. Prayed to, perhaps. But only because some prayers aren’t spoke to God directly.”

“Why would they not be?” Adam brushed his fingers over Ronan’s cheekbones, trying to imagine freckles littered there, like on his own face. The image was much easier if he was imagining the small boy Ronan had tried to stop in his memory.

“Because some problems can be solved by something other than God. Keeps His schedule clear for other things.”

“How do you get by with one God?” Adam asked.

“An all encompassing faith in Him.”

Adam made a sound and leaned forward to lay against Ronan’s shoulder. “We should have done the ritual before what happened last night,” he eventually said when Ronan’s breath became a little more frequent and his heartbeat rose as he awoke.

“Yeah, the Catholic church probably isn’t too happy with what I did either.”

“What does the Catholic church require you to do beforehand?” The name was odd on Adam’s tongue, too unwieldy and long.

“Catholics believe you should get married before you make love to someone,” Ronan said. Finally he opened his eyes and shifted slightly so he could look at Adam and bring a hand up to his hair.

“Are you a Catholic?” Ronan nodded. “Where are Catholics from?”

“The religion?” Ronan clarified. “Rome, I think. It’s where the Pope lives anyway. Uh, he’s like the highest, most powerful priest in the world,” he explained quickly at Adam’s confusion.

“What is Rome?”

They both took a second to stare at each other before dissolving into laughter over the absurdity of it. 

“Uh, it’s what defeats Greece eventually. It’s in Italy. Which is near Spain, which I told you about earlier. West of Greece and friends.”

Adam nodded, though he couldn’t really imagine it. “Do you know coupling like this links us forever?” he asked. “If done properly.”

Ronan thought back to stupid presentations and balls of foil mashed together and velcro that didn’t stick anymore. He figured that wasn’t what Adam meant. “How so?” he hummed, dragging his fingers over Adam’s arm slowly.

“Your philosopher Socrates spoke of it once, brokenly. It isn’t his fault. It is Atlantean and Atlantean is too advanced for the Greeks. But he’d said people are born with only half of their body and they must find the other half to be truly happy. When you couple, the union is complete.”

Ronan did know that story. Aurora used to tell him a version of it. He imagined it was probably because the story didn’t need genders and she was too perceptive of her son’s tendencies. “What is the Atlantean version?” he asked.

“That our hearts beat just fine without another, but that your work should be to find someone whose heart beats when yours is silent, and is silent when yours beats.”

“What does that have to do with making love?” Ronan asked, brow furrowing.

“The sigils in our bodies aren’t just for priests and communication with the gods. They’re a physical glimpse into our souls. Supposedly, the sigils match when our heartbeats match. If you were to ‘make love’ with someone, the sigils will work to match your heartbeats, change your physical form so that you can be together.”

Ronan thought back to the man in Adam’s memory and his clear skin. He wondered if it was normal or if he’d lost them or ignore them so long they went away. “I don’t understand what tradition has to do with it. I have no sigils to match with yours anyway. Just this.” He held out his wrist and Adam leaned forward to kiss the words gently.

“I know. It would take a high priest to give you sigils. Last night could have been very  painful, had I not already known we were... _ tin epithymía tis kardiás _ … What was your word again?” He touched Ronan’s mark and looked up at him with wide, clear eyes.

“Soulmates,” Ronan said softly, lost at sea and wanting only to drown.

Adam smiled broadly.  “Soulmates. It’s much shorter than the Greek.”

“What are you saying in Greek?” Ronan asked, coming back to himself quickly.  “Gansey blushed when Blue said that to you earlier and you used part of it at the waterfall.”

“It means desire of my heart. I called you my desire by the waterfall.” Adam brushed his fingers over Ronan’s cheek and then into his hair. “It’s growing out. We could cut it if you’d like. Or shave your face.”

“I want the sigils,” Ronan said suddenly. His chest was so full of love and adoration, he thought he might explode if he didn’t do something to show it all back to Adam. And he wanted to be bound to Adam. If the  mark wasn’t enough, or was too human, it was only fair he get the Atlantean version for himself.

Adam’s smile fell a little and his fingers went to Ronan’s chest. “It is painful. And it is magical. It will add something to you that you will feel always. Especially if you leave Atlantis.”

Ronan nodded firmly. “I know. Please. I want to. I want to be yours.” He brought Adam’s fingers to his lips and Adam let him kiss each knobby joint of his knuckles.

“You are already so magical, Ronan. What more could I give you?”

“Everything,” Ronan insisted, leaning forward to rest his head against Adam’s. “Everything good. My magic isn’t. It’s...it’s...made of the bad in me. Even when I try to make it good, bad comes out.”

“That’s not true,” Adam hushed. “You’ve conjured light and flowers in your sleep. You littered my room with the most beautiful petals and the sweetest smell.”

“But I take out bad too. It’s been good because I’ve been happy, but Adam you don’t know me. You don’t know what I’m like up there. I’m alone and I’m angry and there was so much the gods didn’t show you about me. You don’t know me completely and you won’t want me after if I don’t find some good in me.”

“That’s not true,” Adam repeated again, shifting so he could hold Ronan’s head against his chest. “Magic is made of what you feed it. Even these sigils will produce evil if you give it the anger you speak of. I do not know you, epithymía, but I want to. All of it. And I won’t turn away from you, not ever. Just like I know you won’t turn from me.”

Ronan clutched onto Adam’s hips and let himself grieve and think silently, Adam’s fingers on his back tracing new designs in his tattoo. Eventually Ronan sat back and undid the leather bands around his wrists and held them out for Adam to examine in full, not just the scrawled word by his wrist bones.

Adam ran his fingers over the scars slowly and frowned. “I don’t understand? We all have scars. These are scars,” he said, reaching up to trace the sigils. “This.” He touched the gnarled scar by his ear, where he’d fallen that day.

“No. Adam. I…” Ronan looked away and squeezed his eyes shut. “I wanted to die. I wanted to die and I dreamed something to kill me. It almost did. My best friend had to call an ambulance. I was in a church.”

Adam gently pulled his face back and kissed his forehead. “It’s okay, Ronan. Thank you for telling me. But this doesn’t change how I see you. Not even a little bit. I’m still in love with you. Still your soulmate. This doesn’t change what the sigils will do for you. We all hurt, Ro. That’s never going to change. You dreamed this, but you also dreamed a room full of flowers. You are so much more grand than you give yourself credit for.”

He pulled Ronan into a kiss and rested their foreheads together. “Get the sigils, or don’t. I love you and you’re still all of this at once. And I still love you.”

Ronan kissed Adam back and ignored the salty tears that dripped into his mouth. “I want them. I want to be yours,” he finally said again.

Adam nodded and knocked their foreheads together lightly. “I love you. I’ll call a high priest.”

“Wait, wait,” Ronan said, managing a hiccupping laugh. “Come here.” He dragged Adam back by his hips and shifted over him so he was caging Adam in with his knees and arms. He slotted their mouth together and let Adam grab onto his shoulders, let the blanket fall away as his hips moved against Adam’s.

*  * *

The Temple was on the top of the northernmost hill. (“The gods always protect their temples and shrines. Of course its divine position would be saved despite the floods and earthquakes” Adam had said with just a little bit of a scoff in his voice.)

It was dark and Ronan saw light sources for the first time in the form of hundreds of candles spread around the altar and down the corridor of the temple. Ronan didn’t realize how much he missed being able to tell where light came from. He’d dreamed lightning bugs for Adam’s small room which had hardly any natural light, but that was the only other time, and it felt like he cheated on that one.

Adam was there, kneeled by Ronan’s side. His sigils were glowing so brightly that Ronan could forget about the candles. Gansey and Henry and Blue were also there, kneeled down behind him. (“It helps to have loved ones around. Makes the sigils more powerful.” And Ronan had wanted to ask how Adam’s ended up so powerful because it didn’t seem like he had many people here.)

The high priest had done something with smoke that had put Ronan out of it and he couldn’t make out what the man was saying, until he’d lapse into Latin and Ronan would catch a phrase. He was laying on his stomach and his head was heavy. He felt exposed. He couldn’t remember the last time, save with Adam, that he had been so naked around other people. He’d used to show his tattoo off like a badge of honor, but since Noah had died, his Noah-given title of ‘badass punk’ felt hollow and meaningless. He didn’t even know if Gansey and Henry knew about it or not between all their training and simulations and wetsuits. Surely Gansey did.

The priest was speaking to Adam, and Ronan could feel the reverence in the air. He was catching pieces of conversation that he thought he wasn’t supposed to.

“Where do you propose these sigils go, young one? Why not use his bare chest or arms?”

“No. This is his magic too. Place the sigils in the white spots between the darkness.” Adam ran his fingers over Ronan’s back, picking them up and setting them back down and tracing an inversion of his tree.

“If you insist, young one.”

Ronan looked up and caught a corner of the priest’s mouth lifting slightly, hidden from Adam by a tumble of hair.

Even through the haze of the smoke in his brain, when the priest’s fingers touched his back, it was like instantaneous fire. Ronan couldn’t help a brief yelp and his fingers scrambled for purchase on the rocks around him. Adam took one of his hands, the one with the mark on it.

Everything Ronan was screaming to get out, and everything in Ronan was screaming to stay right where he was, to fight for this. If he’d thought his chest was going to explode with thoughts of Adam loving him, it was nothing compared to this as he realized the depth of Gansey’s trust and Henry’s friendship and Adam’s love and every single facet of his relationship with his brothers and the agony of the loss of his father and mother and the pain of losing Noah too. It felt like the fire was finding all his most full spots and tearing them open to bleed in Ronan’s chest again.

“This won’t work if he doesn’t believe in the gods,” the priest said.

“He believes in magic and these sigils aren’t for the gods. It will work,” Adam replied stubbornly.

“Human,” the priest said then, stroking his fingers over the fire on Ronan’s back. “Intruder, fighter, explorer, speaker, lover. Go. Find what it is your heart desires most, where your magic comes from.”

The priest lifted his hand and the world went black.


	7. Blood and Gold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Day 8: Free space

“Noah?” Ronan asked once he’d managed to open his eyes. He spit dirt out of his mouth and stood on shaky legs. Then they were bounding at each other, knocking together so hard it took the breath out of Ronan’s chest. Ronan hugged Noah until Noah’s feet weren’t on the ground and they were clinging to each other desperately.

“What the fuck is going on?” Ronan asked. He kept one arm around Noah’s back and brought the other up to wipe at wetness on his face that he was refusing to admit was there. “No offense, man, but you’re not my deepest desire,” he laughed wetly.

Noah waved a hand around. “Cabeswater’s energy pulled me in. I’ve been here this whole time.”

Ronan shook his head. “I’ve felt Cabeswater. I’ve used it. I never knew you were here. You couldn’t have been here.”

The trees swayed towards them with a hearty breeze and leaves tumbled over their heads.

“You’ve used it, but you haven’t been back. There’s been so much energy here that the trees started to die. It was killing everything.”

Ronan Lynch’s magic began in a forest. It always had. When he was young and awoke on the mossy ground, he’d made a second home between the trees, trailing after an orphan girl with hooves and winged creatures that swooped down over him to mess up his hair. As Ronan grew older and bigger, so did his forest and so did his magic. 

No one ever told him about it. They wrote his dreams off as signs of an overactive imagination, even when he brought back things that shouldn’t be--flowers that glowed and birds that understood him and baby brothers that grew.

When his father died, Ronan felt it in Cabeswater. The forest wilted like forgotten plants. The moss ground died and revealed hard rock. The winged creatures grew vicious and angry in the same measures that Ronan did. The orphan girl did not grow. Ronan had not abandoned Cabeswater then. As a child, sleep was his only escape from the horrors and pain of reality and he built Cabeswater until it was a forest he recognized, but not one he knew.

He loved Cabeswater and abused it and begged from it and cherished it and stole from it all his life. The creatures got meaner and the stolen items got trickier and the orphan girl didn’t grow. In college, he forced himself to dream less. Enough to keep Cabeswater healthy, to keep himself healthy because he thought he’d really die without dreaming. He found friends to love and abuse and beg from and cherish and steal from and no friend was closer to Ronan’s heart and soul than Noah Czerny.

After Ronan had been accepted into a graduate research expedition and summer travel course as an undergrad, Noah--five years his senior and just as immature and aged as Ronan was--took to him like they were long lost brothers. While the rest of the graduate students tolerated Ronan’s presence, Noah roomed with him and explored the city with him and even enabled his drag racing. Drag racing in Rome in the dead of night with the full moon over him and the most historical sites racing by him made Ronan believe in the Roman gods and Noah’s laughter in the seat next to him made him feel like one.

Ronan and Noah lived together throughout Ronan’s masters and most of his doctoral degree. Noah never finished his masters degree, but he stayed in their busy college town and worked odd jobs that he charmed his way into. As an archeology student first and classics minor second, Noah could talk his way into any of Ronan’s school trips. Ronan wasn’t particularly keen on archeology, but as his status in the translation community grew, so did scholar’s wishes to have him on digs for immediate translation.

They were in Turkey when it happened. It was a crew Ronan and Noah were both familiar with. Many of the students from Ronan’s first study abroad were acting as post-docs or professors over a group of undergrads, many of whom Ronan had taught in introductory Latin once they’d given him a student-teaching position. Noah’s old flame was there and it made things a little awkward, but Whelk was damn passionate about this shit and if he could find artifacts that may not exist, then so be it.

Whelk was working late. Most of the students had gone off in search of food and booze and Ronan and Noah were trying to figure out how much trouble they’d get in for finding a street racing circle. Vowing to keep both of their records clean, Noah removed himself from the situation. He’d go see what Whelk was up to and if he was finding anything or just getting dustier.

Ronan eventually gave up on trying to get into trouble and pulled out a book to read and tucked his earbuds into his ears. He figured if he told the kids not to get him in trouble, he shouldn’t stick his nose in their trouble either. The hours passed and Ronan kept dozing until another obnoxiously loud group of students came back and he’d wake up again and try to stay awake for Noah.

Eventually he got tired of it. The campsite had been quiet for hours and Noah still wasn’t back. He thought Noah would appreciate it if Ronan hauled him out of Whelk’s tent and bedroll. Noah had explicitly told Ronan to keep him from making mistakes and sleeping with Whelk was a big fucking mistake as far as Ronan was concerned.

He threw his book and earbuds aside and went after Whelk’s tent. But it was empty and the lamp the pretentious shit insisted he use for light was cold. So Ronan went off for the excavation site Whelk had been working on with a select few of his own grad students.

For a horrid moment after arriving, Ronan thought he was staring at his father’s body again. There was so much blood, soaking into ancient and unreadable runes at the bottom of the site. And in the middle of it, Noah’s crumbled body, pale and lifeless. His eyes were reflecting moonlight and looked empty. There was a fucking hold in his head.

Ronan assumed he called for help. He knew he was holding Noah when emergency personnel got there, knew he’d made his way down the excavation site and grabbed Noah and tried to hold his face together. He assumed he cried. Howled probably.

He just couldn’t remember. The image of Noah’s body was all he could see when he thought about that night. His memory skipped to sitting in a hospital waiting room, covered in blood and being interviewed by the police. He didn’t even remember the first half of the interview.

He dreamed nothing but nightmares and winged creatures and monsters with teeth that wanted to beat Ronan to death or slit his wrists or make him watch the orphan girl die.

He hadn’t gone to Cabeswater since.

“Did you scream?” Ronan asked, apropo of nothing.

Noah, for his part, didn’t look confused. He gave a tired little smile and shook his head. “No, Roan. I didn’t scream. There was no way you could’ve known, nothing you could’ve done. He was trying to complete a ritual. Wanted to find a god.”

Ronan shook his head harshly and grabbed Noah again, hugging him tightly. “I’m so sorry, No. I should have none. I should have stopped it. I should have gone with you.”

Noah held him back and rubbed Ronan’s shoulders gently. “It’s okay. It’s okay. I never blamed you. I stuck around so I could see you again. You’re saving me even now. Cabeswater knew I shouldn’t die. It brought me back.”

“Not back enough,” Ronan muttered and he felt like he was about to cry again.

“Ronan, there’s no need to carry the whole weight of the world on your shoulders. You are not responsible for everything you’ve seen,” Noah murmured. “You’ve seen so much already.”

Ronan felt something twist in his stomach and he had to let go of Noah to vomit next to them. Because Cabeswater was used to Ronan being upset and drunk, it knew what to do with vomit.

“Retching,” Noah scoffed dramatically. “Isn’t this something you know about.”

Ronan shoved his side hard and Noah laughed before coming back to him. He rubbed Ronan’s back and put a steadying hand on his shoulder as he stood. “Are you okay? This isn’t just for us to catch up. This is an introspection of your soul.”

“Don’t be so fucking dramatic,” Ronan said. But Noah gestured to the forest and the gold liquid of the sigils was starting to crawl over the trees in Cabeswater.

“What are you doing this for, Roan?” Noah asked softly.

“Because I love him,” Ronan said over the crackling of branches and leaves. Ronan braced himself, closed his eyes for the inevitable violence. Right after his father’s death, he’d tried to run from them, but they always caught up. They had wings for god’s sake.

“I’ll leave you to it. Remember why you do this,” Noah said and pulled Ronan into a tight, fierce hug.

Then he was gone and one of the night terrors was standing in front of him, breathing hot gusts down Ronan’s face and chest.

Ronan opened his face and first traced the pale pink life lines under the white skin. The white one was the worst. It was the one that always tried to eat the orphan girl.

(“Why do you hate it?” she’d asked once. “It’s you. Why do you hate you?”)

Its red eyes weren’t as bright as they usually were. In fact, rather than rage in them, Ronan thought he saw curiosity. It knocked its head against Ronan’s and then stepped back. Ronan let his brains vibrate for a second before he took a step forward and raised his hands to the creature’s face. It had fur under its feathers. Ronan didn’t know why he dreamed it like that. It was hot to the touch and Ronan had to card his fingers through its feathers and fur to keep from hurting his hands.

The creature let out a small sound and knocked its head against Ronan’s again. It brought its talons up and hooked them over Ronan’s shoulders. He froze under the hold. He knew how easily those things could sink into his flesh, how fucking badly it hurt, and what hell it was to rip them back out. But the night horror wasn’t sinking its talons into him. It was just holding him still and making weird noises.

“It’s hungry,” orphan girl said, appearing at Ronan’s feet.

He scowled at her. “How do you know that?”

“Because it makes that sound before it tries to eat me. Give it a rat.” She held up her hands, which suddenly had one of the weird muskrat looking things Ronan had found in the fields of Atlantis. He took its limp body from her hands and offered it to the night horror.

It ate it before Ronan realized he wasn’t holding it anymore.

“Try another. It’s big. You made your rage so big.” She held up another animal and Ronan gave it to the creature.

“Why are these from Atlantis?” he asked. “How do you even know about these animals?”

“Because I see everything you do. Everything here does. We know what you know.” She looked at the night horror and her small body was trembling but determination kept her staying put. “If you feed your rage hate, it grows uglier. But you don’t hate much in Atlantis.”

Still, she wasn’t going to touch it any time soon. She pressed closer to Ronan’s leg and Ronan reached down to muss her hair.

“It wants to eat me because I’m not hate.”

Ronan reached to pet the night horror’s nose, along the slick curve of its beak. “I’m sorry,” he said, just a little brokenly. “And I forgive you. Us. Me.”

The night horror squawked and ruffled its feathers before pressing its face close to Ronan’s again.  Ronan closed his eyes and leaned against its hot head.

*  * *

“Adam!” Ronan gasped, waking with a start and coughing on the dust from the temple’s floor. Salty and old and nothing like Cabeswater’s soil.

Adam was in his arms suddenly, pressed against his chest and holding him tightly. Ronan tried to sit up, but his head swam and his body protested and he ended up falling on his side. Adam just went down with him.

He didn’t have words for what happened. He didn’t know if he could admit to what he saw or felt, even if he wanted to. Which he did. He brought his arms around Adam’s back and only then noticed his fists were closed tightly. He opened one and a feather covered in blood and gold unraveled from his palm. In the other, he held a small knit hat, perfect for white-blond ringlets and pointed ears.

The priest waited until Ronan and Adam got to their feet. “You are, by far, the strangest thing to get sigils in our holy space,” he said, and there was a small smirk on his lips. “If you’d like to see.” He gestured to a small pool, waist high and angled upwards, acting as a mirror.

Adam helped Ronan to the bath and turned him so his back was facing it. When Ronan looked over his shoulders, he found that the spaces in his tattoo were filled with gold. It bled over his sides and crept between feathers and dripped down the trees and grew between roots. Black and gold like the rest of the city. He touched a spot on his side and looked at his fingers, expecting them to shine.

Adam looked a little giddy and excited next to him. “I want you to feel this,” he murmured before he was leaning up to kiss Ronan deeply, without a care for their audience, holy and not.

If Ronan had thought the previous night had felt good, he’d obviously been out of his mind. This was so far beyond anything he’d ever imagined and dreamed of. He kissed Adam back, bringing his hands to Adam’s face. The sigils didn’t burn him, but his back was slightly warm. He could hear Gansey murmuring in amazement, but he didn’t care. He felt like his soul was singing.

Adam finally had to be the one to break away.

“What was that?” Ronan asked, unable to stop the wide grin from spreading over his face.

“That was our souls meeting finally. I think they were a good match.” Adam smiled up at him and brought Ronan’s knuckles to his mouth.

“Well, perhaps they need a second opinion.” And he pulled Adam close to him again.

“Let’s go home, _tin epithymía tis kardiás_ ,” Adam murmured against his lips.

Ronan rested his hand over Adam’s chest, felt his strong heartbeat, loud for every time Ronan’s was quiet. “My soulmate,” he murmured and kissed Adam again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! This is definitely something I want to expand. I'm using the tag 'pynch atlantis' on tumblr if you'd like to follow updates and what not. You can also follow me [here](http://abarbaricyalp.tumblr.com/) and drop me a line or something!!!


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